The worst, though, was when we had a comic that proved that "2 girls 1 cup" was a more popular phrase than putting other numbers the the "x girls y cups" formula. HOLY SHIT! it's only like there was a popular internet meme about "2 girls 1 cup" and there WASN'T ONE for "6 girls 5 cups." Why is anyone surprised by this?

The corresponding graphs in today's comic are "[x bottles of beer on the wall," "there are [x]lights," "drink [x] glasses of water a day" and "I got [x] problems." All of these have a common phrase they are associated with where a single specific number is used for X. Of course "I got 99 problems" will be an outlier. That's cause no one has written a popular song called "I got 39 problems"! What's the point? Maybe for "there are [x] lights" the point is that the nerd reference to star trek has permeated the internet enough that 4 is actually an outlier, but still, when your point is "star trek nerds spend a lot of time online" I can hardly care.

Anyway, that only takes us through 4 of the 10 graphs. Let's talk about the other 6. Tell me if you see a pattern:

-Number of girl- or boyfriends-Age and lack of boyfriends (oddly, no corresponding one for girlfriends, here)-penis length-What middle or high school grade one is it-bra size-intelligence

Do you see what I mean? It's weirder because he doesn't actually draw attention to it in the comic - these are interspersed with the others. But the point is still: High schoolers, sexyparts, needing a boyfriend. Doesn't that make anyone else...a little creeped out?------------------What I really hate about these google comics is that they really, truly, have no point. You'll note that with these comics, Randall never actually tells you what you should think about any of this, never interprets the data he gives you. He just presents it. That's because, I think, he respects the scientific method enough to realize that the data he is showing you is woefully unscientific. Google results vary wildly depending on who is doing them (based on what links you've clicked on before, where you are, etc) and anyway, the number of times something is said online is indicative of very little beyond the number of times that this is said online. It tells you nothing about how people actually use that phrase in real life. Sometimes, if you are very careful, you can extrapolate more from the data, but Randall doesn't even try. He just presents the facts as being interesting on their own, which - sorry! - they are not.

----------Actually, not only is the data not interesting, it's not even accurate. People were arguing, quite violently, about this in the comments, so I chose one and decided to check.

I decided to look at one of the more illogical ones, the one that searched for "I'm and have never had a boyfriend." The results were: this comic is crazy wrong! The comic says that the results for 17, 18, and 19 (the outlier and the two data points next to it) are ~450,000, ~700,000, and ~400,000, respectively. My results were as follows:

if X = 17 : 8,790

if X = 18 : 9,940

if X = 19 : 5,910

How on earth did he get into the hundreds of thousands range? I have no idea. I know that some of you are thinking "well try it without quotes" but that a) is pointless, because then each age is likely to turn up in searches for other ages, and b) the results without searches make all the numbers jump up to the millions range (perhaps because of problem a). So I don't know what to conclude from this, besides the fact that Randall is just wrong.

I'm not going to bother with the others because I am lazy. I am sure some are right, I am sure that some are wrong. He's got a lot of numbers there. But it makes me think that Randall just made up some of these, which really is just sad. You can't find lame google searches on your own, so you make up boring results? Quite a good job you've got there. Quite a good job.

Okay, I've tried the "I'm 18 and never had a boyfriend" one on Google.COM, and here're the results..

With quotes: 9,930Without quotes: 4,930,000

That's WAY out of the league of 600K Randall presents us. Sorry, Anonymous who love to prove the results are right, it didn't work this time.

But, as I said, I'm not bothered by the numbers. If Randall is merely making up them to fit on the references/whatevers he wants to make, I don't care. Because, as I showed before, the graphs are utter shit and Randall is showing to be a lazy hack. How much effort and time can it be worth to simply put a grid over the image and check if the numbers fit with the coordinates, and use a selection tool to correct it?

Not much, I bet. And that's why I don't see why his fanbase respects him so much...

Tom: I hope not. This thing doesn't even have a minimum degree of effort to become a poster. If it does, and sells, then I'm losing all hope on humanity.

It'll totally become a poster! ... posters sell! ... Mr. Randall is in the business of making sales! ... hmm... it's times like these I really respect Bill Watterson for not selling out! - doubly so since he actually had a quality product!

Why does it say "They lose steam at 66" when the graph is shown to be continually going up at that point? If he'd made that comment at say, 49 or 99 it would've made sense (since it pretty much dips down and stays low at that point) but where he has it it makes literally NO sense.

Also on the boy/girlfriend graph he put the first "boy-" in a really stupid location since it LOOKS like it is next to the first point on the "girl-" line, making it look like the line starts out as boy but ends as girl. Why did he put it in such a stupid place?

Why didn't he include the numbers one and two on the penis length graph? I just googled and there's certainly results for those. Why start it at three?

And why in the world isn't there a corresponding graph for "i'm x and never had a girlfriend," like Carl said? I can only assume it is because he wants to seem sympathetic to women.

I also fail to see the point of the junior/senior split on the grade graph. It just doesn't make any sense.

This whole comic just fails to even be anything. It's not a joke, it's not interesting, I don't know what it is. He could just make a graph about pizza toppings and that would be it, literally, and it wouldn't be interesting or funny in the slightest but his fans would probably say it was the greatest comic of all time.

It must feel amazing, being able to brainwash people into thinking that your shit smells like bakery fresh cinnamon rolls.

Nate: First, because people sing "bottles of beer" in reverse. That's why 65 is lower than 66.

Second... the less I think about it, the better. Third, again, Randall's graphs are shoddy, he has no actual criteria. Maybe he didn't have space.

Fourth, pretty much what I thought, too. Randall has double standards, that's much a given.

In second thought, this comic is a mix of the formula of a graph comic and that "snow tracks": a collection of mini-jokes. It wouldn't be so bad, if they weren't so badly delivered. I'm hoping Randall will have some sense and drop one day of his schedule to try and achieve some better quality.

It's a clear as day testament to how uninspired he is. "Numbers," oh that's got some insight, there are NUMBERS in this comic. "Google results for various phrases," however, really, really sucks. He establishes no theme or structure from graph to graph, they're just a collection of things. Hooray for you, you can search, write, and plot points. Profound.

You know what I was thinking during this contest? Biology, specifically the numerous types of ways natural selection and speciation occurs. (Stablizing, Directional etc.) I couldn't hazard a guess at what the joke was.

Anyway, if this comic were reflective of his resume, I imagine his resume would look something like this:

1. My name is Randall Munroe2. I am proficient at drawing stick-figures3. I know over 9000 memes.4. All your base are belong to us.5. The cake is a lie6. ???7. Profit!

That is to say, disjointed, lacking continuity, makes little to no headway with original point, and fails miserably at what it tries to do.

Thought 1.It's comics like this make me imagine people reacting to xkcd in later years as they would to their high school music taste.

"Oh god you read xkcd too? What were we thinking? I came across it again a few months ago and I couldn't believe how bad it is! How come we never noticed at the time?"

- - - -

Thought 2.I don't think Randy gets the idea of bad material.

Of all the ways to separate the pros from the amateurs - and in anything, writing, sports, music, glass-blowing, anything - a pretty solid one is: the pros know what is good and what is bad, and they don't like - to the point of being deeply ashamed of - what is bad.

Randy doesn't know which comics he draws are good and therefore worth posting, and which bad and not worth wiping his arse with, and he likes them all and isn't so ashamed of any one that he would hold off posting it. He's an amateur.

I also like how the lines don't even go through the points he's plotted. I mean if he's just making up numbers he might as well draw the points on the lines. See "in x grade", "x inch penis" and pretty much every one after that. Also on "x grade' we get a nice no-effort trembly line that looks terrible but fuck it, why actually expend effort to fix it?

"and how goddamn patronising do you need to be to point out that 100 is the 'actual average' for IQs"

It would have been interesting enough (in a picto-blog way) to do a series of graphs that show Google results for traits people frequently exaggerate (such as IQ or penis length) with the averages from studies put on the graph. It still wouldn't be much, but it'd be better.

P#1 - "The visual display of quantitative information" is a book Randall likes and has mentioned before, it clearly influenced a lot of his graph comics (especially the Gravity Wells one)

Nate - one explanation was that when people sing the song, they start at 99 and work their way down, so since more people "sing" 67 bottles of beer on the wall than "sing" 66 bottles, they are losing steam as the song goes on. Can you find the flaw in that theory? WHY YES: it is that "singing a song" and "writing words on the internet" are totally different activities, and people do not sing long songs by writing the words out outline.

"I also like how the lines don't even go through the points he's plotted. I mean if he's just making up numbers he might as well draw the points on the lines. See "in x grade", "x inch penis" and pretty much every one after that. Also on "x grade' we get a nice no-effort trembly line that looks terrible but fuck it, why actually expend effort to fix it?"

I hate the comic too, but he attempted to draw best-fit or average curves, that's why they're like that. And this is my counterpart, R2-D2.

Speaking of Rob's older post about not being able to avoid xkcd, I share this anecdote: this one was shown to me at work today, obviously because I work with computer science undergrads. When I shifted uncomfortably and said, "Uh, I'm not a big fan of xkcd," they looked at me like I raped a puppy.

(Note to self: add 'rape a puppy' to 'list of things I'd rather do than read xkcd.')

Also, I am a big fan of the same Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and I am inordinately (and inappropriately) fond of infographics in general and that Röyksopp video in particular. Speaking now as an aficionado of the genre, I have to say that Randall neither conveys interesting information nor presents it in an exceptionally compelling way, with the exception of the movie one which is by far the best chart he's created.

If the IQ can be modeled with a normal distribution, why does Randall's graph for it begin from 80 while extending over to 170? These seem rather arbitrary limits, because when I googled some of the below 80 IQs, some of them got similar amounts of results as the higher up ones.

Google search result counts are ridiculously bad estimates with no bearing on reality. Proof:

Configure your Google search page for 10 results per page. Search for "I'm 18 and have never had a boyfriend". You'll get about 9000 estimated results.

Now go to the second results page. As it turns out, there are only 16 results! Oh my. You'll see the same thing up front if you configure Google for 100 results per page.

I'm pretty sure Google just doesn't do accurate phrase search for the search result estimates. You don't think Google is actually going through millions of documents (indexed, doesn't matter - indexes still aren't great for phrases) and picking out the exact number that contain your exact phrase, do you? It'll probably work a lot better without quotes, but that defeats the purpose of the experiment.

His choice of "best-fit" lines is pretty weak though. With the 4 meme comics (bottles of beer, glasses of water, lights and problems) where we'd expect 1 value to be an outlier, he's got 3 different kinds of "best-fit" lines. Bottles of beer and problems have lines that go through the data points, and aren't actually best-fit lines unless you're using some ridiculous polynomial to model the data. Glasses of water is also a polynomial, but not as ridiculous; still, he shouldn't have run the "best-fit" line through the outlier. Lights is a straight line (i.e., log relationship on this log graph), and he doesn't run it through the outlier (why not when he did it for water?). He's just picking random lines for his "best fit", without considering what the underlying data means. In all the meme cases, best fit lines aren't appropriate; the outlying value is important and should be on the trend line that simply runs through the data points (there's no reason to think that a polynomial equation describes how many glasses of water a day are recommended by different sources). Although not a meme, the penis size graph also has an outlier at 12 inches that shouldn't be glossed over in a bogus trend line; since it's self reported size, it's not just an aberration in the data that larger numbers of people are choosing a round number (1 foot) to report.

I do wish Mr. Munroe would come out and admit that he was running out of ideas instead of feeding us these ridiculous graphs. Maybe he should just take a month off or something so he can come up with some new material.

"Configure your Google search page for 10 results per page. Search for "I'm 18 and have never had a boyfriend". You'll get about 9000 estimated results.

Now go to the second results page. As it turns out, there are only 16 results! Oh my. You'll see the same thing up front if you configure Google for 100 results per page."

I hate to give Randall some reason, but that happens more because Google is smart enough to not show the thousands of pages that are exactly the same. In fact, the "I'm 18 and never had a boyfriend" results look like some sort of relationship site spammin on random foumrs than legitimate data.

It's often noted on this blog that the complexity/obscurity of science references in xkcd has been lowering for quite some time... maybe this comic's reference to teenagers is similarly reflective of a shift in xkcd's target demographic?

In 716, its impossible for the bloody bat to still be there in the last panel since that would mean future rob would still be there as well (since he obviously can't return to his time after he hit his past self in the head).

So I was thinking there's no way he did the searches by hand to get data points for every discrete value in these graphs. I think either:

a) He made most of the values up. It would explain the disjoint between reported values and actual values mentioned in this post.

or b) He wrote a program that, when fed phrases and a variable, searches Google for each phrase over a certain range of the variable. It then plots these values and draws some sort of curve (mostly best-fit, but not always). Randall then takes this, puts it in Photoshop, and applies some kind of "make it look shitty and hand-drawn" filter.

The sad thing is, both of these options are probably equally likely of being true...

How dare you accuse Randall of not being non-profit he built a school and I'll have you know it is impossible to build a school without keeping some of the money from the store sales for yourself, everyone knows that.

Anyway, 716. Um...it certainly is a comic. Admittedly I had to read it twice to get the joke. It's not terrible at any rate but it isn't really that funny. Also he explained the joke in the alt-text. Blah. Though in fairness I suppose if he hadn't explained it I would've said it didn't make any sense.

haha. oh man, those guys on the chainsawsuit comments are so dumb! they think that Randall (a) has a job (b) gave his profits to charity! No, no, they got it all wrong. Randall writes XKCD for his job, and he made money from the book sales. The school was funded by the publisher's shares of book sales. Randall gave up nothing. His only charitable contribution was the ticket sales for the signing, if I recall correctly.

That was such a brilliant move on Ranall's part, though. He got all the benefit of giving to charity without, in fact, giving fuck-all to charity.

This information was presented by Randy himself, if memory serves. I'm not just making this up. The problem is it's a complicated arrangement--in order to be absolutely clear that Randall isn't giving up any money himself, you have to spell it out pretty clearly, so most stories about it failed to do so, in part, I think, because Randall himself wasn't very clear. It wasn't lying, but he successfully managed to convince everyone that he had just made a book and given all the proceeds to charity without doing any such thing.

Today's (Friday's) comic might be the worst XKCD in months, or ever. There was no attempt at outlining character motivation; there was no attempt to have a punchline. I suspect Randall tried to write a comic so incoherent it became funny. Evidently, he succeeded on the first measure but completely failed on the second.

I have a strong feeling of deja-vu about the last one. I've definitely seen "this happens every month or so" in relation to time travelling before. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? Am I going insane?

Anon 9:13 wrote: In 716, its impossible for the bloody bat to still be there in the last panel since that would mean future rob would still be there as well (since he obviously can't return to his time after he hit his past self in the head).

Hey. HEY. hey. hey. There's a contrived explanation for everything. Most likely, "future Rob" had experienced some stable time loops, got annoyed by them, and then after running through them he decided to build a "time machine" that invades parallel universes, then jumps to a universe exactly like the one he has come from, except that in this universe a "future Rob" has come out of nowhere, and has killed "present Rob." Therefore, "future Rob" is really a cylon and thus everything makes perfect sense.

The lastest comic (time traveller) is one of those typical XKCD ones where I read it through a few times and think; this IS actually a sort of funny idea, but it's just executed so clumsily. Randall comes up with some vaguely interesting concepts, but instead of thinking about them and redrafting them until they're genuinely funny, he just wastes the whole idea on the first thing he manages to draw.

TD: I think those comics would be well-executed in a situation where there are established characters. If Randy were capable of characterization and if he had characters that were persistent and recognizable, this sort of thing might work. Part of it is just visual, but part of it is that when there is a persistent world, jokes like this feel less completely out of the blue. They add character, literally and figuratively, to the joke.

There are stories about friends of mine that are funny if you know the person, but probably not remarkable otherwise--or rather, when you hear them you can see the seeds of an interesting story but you feel that something is missing.

Of course, knowing Randy's history with characters (cf. black hat guy, beret guy), the joke would instead become "LOL character has X trait!", which is even more annoying than "LOL science!"

Hey guys, my friend at the physics lab started looking a year older all of a sudden. I'm sure it's just that I've noticed the natural progression of aging, but what if there is a more humorous explanation? FINALLY, AN XKCD I CAN RELATE TO!

Seriously, who the hell is in Randall's target audience now? Highschoolers, or an impossibly small set of physicists?

First, I like the idea. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it had actually been written before as a science fiction short story. And, yes, I read that Abstruse Goose as well. As I did read the SMBC about why time travelers aren't around. It is a common theme, but feel free to call Randall on joke theft again. Whatever.

His execution is... Randallish. I like it that he didn't spell out the joke on the comic, but then he ruined it on the alt text. For all you guys who are complaining about the bat: Rob is the older self. That's the point. I know, I also thought the objective of going back to past was to give himself amnesia and forget the idea, but it turns out it's not. And that's pretty cool.

The third panel looks nice, as well, not counting the disconcected heads. But, frankly, I just gave up complaining about that.

Now, I said all good I had to about this comic.

As I said, Randall had it good, until he ruined his argument by giving it up on the alt text. I wonder why people still consider xkcd a comic "for intelligent people only" when Randall keeps spelling out jokes and all that.

The art is bland as usual, and I could notice the wires on that non-descript equipment there change from panel 1 to 2. That's not a big problem, but, again, consistency does mark good points on my book. It's a stick figure comic, it can't be THAT hard!

I actually really liked the IQ one, because it shows either how people on the Internet think they're smarter than they really are, or people on the Internet have a higher IQ than average. I don't know which it is, but I'll bet it's the first one ;)

The time travel comic reminded me of Primer. A bit *too* much of Primer.

You see, in the movie, Aaron goes back in time, and knocks out his old self and starts living in his place, all under Abe's and the viewer's radar. Eventually, the viewer figures out what's been going on the whole time and...well, then I can't remember what happened. But it's that same sort of thing.

Your posts aren't funny as shit either. xkcd, even in its major suckage now, has given me ten times the enjoyment you guys have. Same thing with xkcd explained. Why is that "funny?"

Actually the only time I laughed on your blog was when mr. lostman corrected the guy with another typo. Jk, I didn't laugh, but it was mildly funny. Also the new comic was pretty amusing in my standards. In all the movies and books and shit, time travelers just tell themselves what to do.

Nice title thar. Really, I don't see Marigold as the type. I'm sure girls hotter than her in real life would read xkcd, but as her favourite comic... The anime fandom and xkcd only have a small about of overlap as far as the broad spectrum of geekiness goes. You could see both of them as shit, sure, but it'd be a different kind of shit.

basically that is one of the few popular webcomics shittier than XKCD and people that read xkcd tend to read QC (and vice versa) so he's probably trying to increase his popularity even more by pandering to the audience of both.

guys, i dunno what to say about the comic, but i really like the art on this one. i mean, the blood on the bat is red! that's damn near revolutionary! i mean, as much as this place loves to hate on the art, you have to admit that randy's just getting more and more better at this!!

QC sucks so hard that even stating so seems redundant. Showing an XKCD shirt seems like meager gratitude for the fact that Randall links to there alongside superior comics like Perry Bible Fellowship and Dinosaur Comics.

about time someone brought up the time paradox thing. I thought I was just being pessimistic to think that, but the whole time reading 716 I was going "Randall, you're a smart (supposedly) guy, why do a time travel joke? It's never a good idea and your knowledge of sci-fi should tell you that"

Also, what is wrong with QC? I'm reading it now to find out what it has done to garner so much hate (course, last time I did that I read like 3 months of updates for Least I Could Do >_<)

*sigh* QC is one of the few webcomics lucky to have an ED article for it and... after reading 600 updates, I have to agree with what they say (despite it all being "for the lulz") and the band references are not actually making the comic any better, it's just making it more and more -_- yes you listen to SONiC all the time, get the fuck over your self (if anyone lives where I live they get what SONiC is but for everyone else, it used to be a "modern rock" radio station and now it's like 80% Indie and 20% 80s-90s grunge, alt shit)

Mal I think that's only because the fact that Futurama is brainstorming done by at least 20 people, all with either degrees in mathematics or even PhDs, and it is edited the fuck out before it's even animated. That said, Randall should strive for that level of prefessionalism, but yeah getting an editor is certainly a step in the right direction for something like that

Wow. All I can say is you all really have too much time on your hands O.o, if it's such a poorly written comic, find something else to occupy your lives. I can see what point you are trying to make, but the vehemence with which you pursue it is puzzling. I see no reason to be so accusatory or to attack someone's work with such venomous barbs. I sincerely hope you contribute something to the world besides this as all you succeed to do here is tear down another person's contributions to the world however meagre you may think they are. Get a life ^^ Create something and share it and put something worthwhile on the net.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.